Neural network fitness functions for a musical IGA

This paper describes recent enhancements to GenJam, a genetic algorithm-based model of a novice jazz musician learning to improvise. After presenting an overview and update of the current interactive version of GenJam, we focus on efforts to augment its human fitness function with a neural network, in an attempt to ease the fitness bottleneck inherent in musical IGAs. Specifically, a cascade correlation technique was used with data taken from populations of musical ideas trained by human mentors interactively. We conclude with a discussion of why this approach failed, and we speculate on approaches that might work

Wind Orchestra: Sketches

Program listing performers and works performe

Sketches

Program listing performers and works performe

Digital voices: Posthumanism and the generation of empathy

This chapter investigates digital technologies that variously assist, enable or simulate musical praxis. The first section sets up an opposition between the idea of the digital tool that augments human agency, and the machinic automatism predicated on the idea that reality is fundamentally number (dataism) and ticks along without the need for human consciousness. This gives rise to the idea that mechanical automatism is also intrinsic to human agency, a strand of posthuman thought on which the rest of the chapter turns. Accordingly, the second section shows how posing algorithmic composition as an expression of the posthuman is problematic. The final section focuses on the synthetic voices of digital assistants from online service providers that generate empathy at the price of a surrogate ‘conscience’. Accommodating this within a humanistic model is possible, but a closing case study of Tod Machover’s futurist opera, Death and the Powers (2010), raises the prospect of what might be called a ‘dark ontology’ of the digital